Page:Outlines of Psychology (Wundt) 1907.djvu/230

 200 II. Psychical Compounds.

object, such as delight and displeasure and, as subforms of the latter in which, various tendencies unite, annoyance, resentment, anger, and rage. Third, we have names of ''ob- jective'' emotions which refer rather to outer events not ex- pected until the future, such as hope and fear and, as modifi- cations of the latter, worry and anxiety. They are combina- tions of feelings of strain with pleasurable and unpleasurable feelings and in different ways with exciting and depressing tendencies as well. Obviously language has produced a much greater variety of names for unpleasurable emotions than for pleasurable. This may be due either to an actual superiority in the number of unpleasurable forms of emotion, or it may be due to the fact that unpleasurable experiences attract a higher degree of attention. Probably the full explanation involves both factors. II. On the basis of the intensity of the feelings, two classes of emotions, namely the weak and the strong, may be distinguished. These concepts, derived from the psychical properties of the feelings, do not coincide with the concepts of sthenic and asthenic emotions, based upon the physical concomitants, for the relation of the psychological categories to the psycho-physical, is dependent not only on the inten- sity of the feelings, but on their quality as well. Thus, weak and moderately strong pleasurable emotions are always sthenic, while, on the contrary, unpleasurable emotions be- come asthenic after a longer duration, even when they are of a low degree of intensity, as for example care and anxiety. Finally, the strongest emotions, such as fright, worry, rage, and even excessive joy, are always asthenic. The discrimination of the psychical intensity of emotions is accordingly of subordinate significance, especially since emo- tions which agree in all other respects, may not only have different degrees of intensity at different times, but may on